[Nettime-bold] The Birth of the Internet: the Architectural Conception

[ronda@umcc.ais.org (Ronda Hauben)]

                         Draft for Comment
                          
                     The Birth of the Internet:
                   An Architectural Conception 
            for Solving the Multiple Network Problem
                                 by  Ronda Hauben
                                 rh120@columbia.edu  
               
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/birth_internet.txt

                         Abstract

The Internet makes it possible to transmit a message across the 
boundaries of dissimilar networks. What is the architectural 
conception that makes such internetwork communication possible? 

TCP/IP is a communications protocol. What are the foundations
that it is built upon?  What does it mean to be a communications 
protocol? 

This draft paper explores these questions and connects them
to the conceptual foundations of communications engineering and 
communications science, as developed by Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener 
and others.

The ARPANET and then the Internet are developments that contribute a new
body of communications experience and knowledge to that which has
been developed in the past as part of communications engineering.

This context makes it possible to understand what it means that 
the computer is a communications device, and a very general one at that. 
And this context makes it possible to understand the nature of the 
Internet as a new conception which builds on the experience and 
research done developing the ARPANET.


Ronda
ronda@panix.com


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